DEAD SOULS

WANG BING

Tickets: €20 (no concessions, free list suspended). Tickets for individual days will not be available. Please retain your ticket for both screenings.

In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert, victims of the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Directed by prolific Chinese artist and filmmaker Wang Bing, Dead Souls is an inquiry into how the Party dealt with ideological dissent and is an investigation into the tragic legacy of the Communist Party rule.

Presented in two four-hour parts across two days, this monumental work reconstructs a hidden chapter of Chinese history by providing testimony from survivors of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui re-education camps. Oral tradition and recalled historical fragments foreground the personal accounts that make the film an essential account of modern China. Reminiscent of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Dead Souls aims to convey the unimaginable and to construct a narrative from almost inconceivable atrocity.